■ Government cuts to social science research risk weakening democracy, accountability, and evidence-based policymaking in New Zealand, writes Dr Mawera Karetai.

In December 2024, the Government quietly dismantled one of the most important safeguards of a functioning democracy. It did not repeal a law, dissolve a watchdog, or defund a commission. It cut social science research. The effect may prove just as consequential.

The Luxon coalition government removed social sciences and humanities from the Marsden Fund beginning in 2025, a fund long regarded as New Zealand’s premier support for investigator-led, “blue skies” research across all academic disciplines.

The Marsden Fund, worth NZ$75 million annually, had been the nation’s most significant funding source for fundamental science. Half of it was redirected toward “research with economic benefits”, with social sciences and humanities cut entirely and their expert panels disbanded.

The Government’s stated rationale is a familiar one.

Minister of Science Judith Collins argued that New Zealanders expect publicly funded research to deliver “clear benefits”.

Physics, chemistry, and mathematics, she suggested, are the more deserving sciences. What this framing deliberately obscures is a profound question: benefits for whom, and measurable by what?

The answer matters because the research being defunded is precisely the research that would tell us.

The New Zealand Association of Scientists called the announcement “chilling”, with co-president Troy Baisden warning that the cuts compounded earlier losses and that the country was “defunding our ability to understand and address some of our most important challenges”.

That framing, while accurate, may still understate the problem. This is not simply about losing knowledge. It is about losing the institutional capacity to hold power to account.

Consider what this government has done in less than two years.

The Luxon coalition has cut public service budgets, restored tax advantages to landlords, and systematically unwound many of the policy reforms of the previous Labour government.

It repealed world-leading smokefree legislation. It introduced the Treaty Principles Bill, which provoked one of the largest protest marches in a generation and set the government on a collision course with Māori.

It passed the Regulatory Standards Act, which critics warned could weaken Treaty of Waitangi protections and advance a libertarian agenda across New Zealand’s legal framework.

Each of these decisions carries real social consequences that will land hardest on those already carrying the heaviest loads.

We know this not from instinct, but from history documented by social scientists.

Research has shown that social and economic policies associated with the welfare restructuring of the early 1990s not only significantly reduced income support for many whānau but were associated with a marked widening of the income distribution and increasing levels of relative poverty.

The same research tradition has shown that socioeconomic position is both a product of and a reflection of government action and inaction, where a lack of meaningful economic investment continues to perpetuate Māori health inequities.

This is exactly the kind of evidence that informs better policy. And it is exactly the kind of research that is now being defunded.

Researchers fear the cuts will disproportionately slash research by Māori scientists.

Massey University sociologist Paul Spoonley, who convened the Marsden Fund’s social sciences panel, put it plainly: “The idea that somehow the economy doesn’t involve people seems to me a very strange one.”

His own work on demographic change, ageing, declining fertility, and the rise of extremism now faces an uncertain future, as does the work of colleagues studying housing, child poverty, criminal justice, and te ao Māori.

Those of us who work at the intersection of research and governance see the implications in practical terms. Elected officials making decisions about communities depend on independent evidence to understand whether policies are working, who they are harming, and what alternatives exist. Strip away that evidence base and you do not end debate; you just ensure the debate is conducted in the dark, with power holding all the torches.

There is a pattern here that deserves naming plainly. The same playbook has been visible in the United States, where the Trump administration gutted federal research agencies, attacked university funding, and systematically dismantled the institutional infrastructure that generates inconvenient facts about inequality, race, health, and the environment.

As one New Zealand expert observed, “abolishing the social sciences and humanities panels of the Marsden Fund sets a dangerous precedent for government intervention into what should be independent research.” That precedent is not being invented here. It is being imported.

The timing is not incidental. Governments pursuing rapid, ideologically driven reform have a strong incentive to ensure that the impact of those reforms is not independently measured, documented, or communicated to the public while the political costs can still be felt. Defunding social science is not an indifference to knowledge. It is a strategy.

As researchers have noted, it is naive to think we can tackle the challenges we face as a country and a world without our humanities and social science scholars and their research.

But there is something more urgent than naivety at stake. Democratic accountability requires that someone be tasked with watching, measuring, and telling the truth about what is happening to people. Social science is how a society looks at itself honestly.

When that capacity is removed, governments do not just save money on research grants. They purchase silence. And the communities who bear the costs of conservative reform, the poorest households, disabled people, children in material hardship, are left without the evidence that might one day vindicate their experience and change the course of policy.

This country has been here before. The 1990s reforms left a generation of damage that took decades to fully document and longer still to partially repair. The scholars who recorded that damage, who traced the lines between policy decisions and infant mortality rates, between benefit cuts and school attendance, between land loss and intergenerational poverty, were doing work that was, in every meaningful sense, a public good.

We should be deeply alarmed that this government has decided we no longer need it. We do need it, and we will suffer from the absence of it.